The Image of the Bushman in

South African English Writing of the

Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

A E Voss

There is in the nature of the case a gap between the "image" of a subservient or
minority group, considered as a group, ("race", "people", "tribe") and the
material conditions of its existence: it is the condition of the subservient group
to live the "facts" , while the means of projection of the image is in the power of
others. The gap is particularly wide in the case of the group called in South
African experience the "Bushmen", who of the indigenous peoples have
proved perhaps most vulnerable to the incursions of colonisation. Thomas
Pringle, one of the more sym pathetic of the literary projectors of the Bushman
image, acknowledged that in the world of the flintlock rather than the world of
the sonnet, he was obliged to callout a commando to resist the depredations of
Bushmen on his location.
Reproduced by Sabinet Gateway under licence granted by the Publisher (dated 2009).

The Bushmen have proved variously necessary or dispensable at different

times in South African history. Even now, as museums and anthropologists
and historians attest, on the brink of extinction the Bushmen remain
necessary both materially and ideologically: as important elements in a
justificatory myth; in assuagement of the ecological guilt that nourishes
"Nature" in reserves and on wilderness trails. The recruitment of Bushman
trackers by the SADF in the Namibia border war is historical repetition of
British military experience on the Eastern Cape frontier in the nineteenth
century.
It is the purpose of this paper to sketch the history of the image of the
Bushman in the literature that follows after Pringle: South African writing in
English from the earlier nineteenth century to the late twentieth century. The
paper cannot deal in any detail with the material facts of Bushman history, but
it does assume a certain interpretation of South African history as a whole:
and it will try to show that the turning points in the history of the Bushman
image occur at crucial moments in the history of South Africa, the most
crucial moment being that of incipient and developing industrialisation and
urbanisation. 1

English in A/rica 14 No.1 (May 1987)

 22 A. E. voss

Pringle's South African poems are late blossoms ofthe Enlightenment. His
"Wild Bushman" is in a tradition of the "Noble Savage" that can be traced
from Herodotus to Samuel Johnson. The writer's purpose in this tradition,
as Hayden White says of Tacitus, was

to bring the provincialism and ethnocentrism of his own people under

attack, to undermine conventions thoughtlessly honoured by his own
generation, to explode prejudice, and to ridicule the barbarities of his own
2
age.

In the case of Pringle, sympathy with the Bushmen was accompanied by a

particular (and also characteristically Enlightenment) understanding of their
provenance. In Pringle's view Bushmen and Hottentots are genetically one,
but socially (economically, materially) distinct. The history ofthe image of
the Bushman since Pringle is a story of emotional and genetic isolation.
Pringle more than once in sympathy and explanation compares the Bushman
to Ishmael. A century later Francis Carey Slater in The Karroo (1924) made
the same comparison, but the tone and feeling have turned entirely:
Reproduced by Sabinet Gateway under licence granted by the Publisher (dated 2009).

In the far days that are gone there dwelt in the ways of the desert,
Scattered and wandering pygmies, hideous, filthy, and squat;
Fitting kindred of Ishmael - their hands against all men were lifted -
Hating all that was human with blind and inveterate hate. 3

Slater barely acknowledges the humanity ofthe Bushmen. Olive Schreiner,

although in writing of servants and a touleier in The Story ofan African Farm
she makes no distinction between "Hottentot" and "Bushman", in From Man
to Man (incomplete at her death, and first published in 1926) distinguishes
clearly between "Old Ayah, the Hottentot woman" and "Griet, the little
Bushman girl." True to the dominant twentieth-century (post-industrial)
stereotypes, Ayah is unsympathetically and Griet very sympathetically
presented. 4
Echoes of Pringle's humanitarian view of the Bushmen recur through the
nineteenth century. A lecture by J.S. Tyler, one of the guardians ofthe party
of Bushmen exhibited in London in 1847 is characteristically ambiguous. On
the one hand, the Bushmen are "morally, mentally and physically" depraved,
"without perception of a deity": on the other hand, "the same God who
invested the Caucasian with the highest attributes made also the poor
benighted Bushman, and gave him claims upon our sympathies, which it were
wrong to deny, and impious to abuse. "S Public reaction to the Bushmen on
 THE IMAGE OF THE BUSHMAN 23

display, however, included this response by Dickens:

Think of the Bushmen. Think of the two men and the two women who
have been exhibited about England for some years. Are the majority of
persons - who remember the horrid little leader of that party in his
festering bundle of hides, with his filth and his antipathy to water, and his
straddled legs, and his odious eyes shaded by his brutal hand and his cry of
"Qu-u-u-u-aa! .. (Bosjesman for something desperately insulting, I have
no doubt) - conscious of an affectionate yearning towards that noble
savage, or is it idiosyncratic of me to abhor, detest, abominate, and abjure
him?6

Dickens acknowledges the humanity of "The Noble Savage":

We have no greater justification for being cruel to the miserable object,

than for being cruel to a William Shakespeare or an Isaac Newton. (339)

The lecturer acknowledges the same relationship more sentimentally:

Reproduced by Sabinet Gateway under licence granted by the Publisher (dated 2009).

The enlightened, the refined, the elevated, the intellectual, the moral
Caucasian - let him repudiate their kindred as he may - he is still the
brother of the benighted Bushman. (2)

The Bushmen on exhibition are clearly being exploited, for entertainment or

edification value, even by their ostensibly sympathetic guardian. (It may be
this that alienates Dickens so strongly from them.) Yet both Dickens and
the guardian are characteristically Victorian in their ascription of
responsibility for the Bushman to a "higher power". (God, fate, history?)
Dickens's statement of the case is harsh:

he passes away before an immeasurably better and higher power than ever
ran wild in any earthly woods, and the world will be all the better when his
place knows him no more. (339)

The "guardian" is sentimental, but no closer to the reality of his subject:

We have no more right to ask why the one [the Caucasian] is intellectual
and moral, and the other degraded and savage, than we have to inquire
why the wing of might and power was given to the eagle, and the gossamer
pinion to the gnat; no more right to ask why this is elevated and that
degraded, than we have to know why the condor of the Andes, with his
 24 A. E. voss

dusky wings, soars in his sunlit fields, while the beetle, with his brilliant
scales, grovels in putrescent remains. It was the will of Him who had the
might to dispose, and, we have no ground to cavil at his dispensation. (2)

Darwin was to publish The Origin of Species in 1859: the "guardian" here
shows a characteristic combination of decadent humanitarianism with
obscurantist religiosity.
Dickens is not concerned with the provenance or the genetic relationships
of the Bushmen, whereas the "guardian" of the Bushmen repeats what had
been the view of Pringle and others of the relationship between Bushman and
Hottentot ("the dispossessed and overpowered Hottentot, with his brother
Bushman": 6). In another lecture given at the time of the Bushman
exhibition, Dr Robert Knox expresses his agreement with Andrew Smith on

the Hottentot and Bosjesman as being identically the same race; differing
in no respect from each other excepting as to wealth - the Bosjesmans
being the outcasts, as it were, of Hottentot society .... 7

At about the same time that Tyler's "Bosjesmans" were being exhibited in
Reproduced by Sabinet Gateway under licence granted by the Publisher (dated 2009).

London, Mrs Harriet Ward was with her husband, Captain John Ward, at the
British military headquarters in Grahamstown, "where she remained until the
end of the Seventh Frontier War (1846-47). ,,8
Mrs Ward is as Victorian as Dickens, Knox or Tyler, yet her image of the
Bushman, shaped as it is by the immediate pressures of her frontier situation,
has many features in common with the twentieth-century myth. In her view
the Bushmen are "the real Aborigines of the land ... and ... a keen-witted
race. ,,9 Mrs Ward had seen rock paintings in a cave on Glenthorn, the
Pringle farm:

a Bushman's cave tempted me ... to scramble through a little forest of

shrubs. In this haunt, for it could scarcely be called a cave, we
discovered some of those curious paintings which present a singular
memento of these creatures of an almost extinct race. . .. This lovely
spot was more like the dwelling-place of fairies than of the hideous
aborigines of South Africa. . .. We tried to imagine the Bushmen eating
here after the day's hunt, and recording its events on the scarp of rock
facing us, at the head of the wooded eminence, now almost roofed in with
tall trees and parasitical plants. (II, 303-04)

This projective sympathy with the Bushman as artist owes something to

Pringle's poems, but sounds "modern" in its evocation of a religious resonance
 THE IMAGE OF THE BUSHMAN 25

in the cave:

I shall long think of the Bushman's haunt, the little chapel in the fertile
valley and, above all, the kindly welcome I met with at Glenthorn.
(11,306)

Mrs Ward's image of the Bushman (and of other indigenous peoples) IS

dictated by the ideological and military needs of the time.

Among our allies employed with the army [in the Frontier War of
1846-47] are 150 Bushmen, with poisoned arrows. (II, 140)

The Hottentots "are little appreciated or even known in other countries" but
"This war has proved that they make the most efficient soldiers for the service
in which they have been engaged" (II, 112). The war and its political and
economic restraints determine the image of ally or enemy: Hottentots were,
for the moment, allies (until the war of 1851-3), as were the Bushmen. 'The
Xhosa were the enemy:
Reproduced by Sabinet Gateway under licence granted by the Publisher (dated 2009).

the stalwart Kaffir, with his powerful form and air of calm dignity,
beneath which is concealed the deepest cunning, the meanest
principles. Some call the Kaffir brave. He is a liar, a thief and a
beggar, ready only to fight in ambush; and although, to use the common
expression, he "dies game", his calmness is the result of sullenness.
(I, 111-12)

Perhaps more important than the Bushmen's military help was their
ideological enlistment on the colonial side:

notwithstanding the broad assertion of our mock philanthropists at

home, that we are not justified in taking from the Kaffir "the land of his
fathers", the country is only his by might - no more his than ours, he
having driven the aborigines from the dwelling-place God originally led
them into. Where are those poor Bushmen, now? Far up the country
among the steep recesses of the mountains, where they form a link
between the animals of the wilderness and human nature. Another
civilization may follow them when the land of their forefathers shall be
under British rule! (II, 176)

Only a few years later, at the time of the next Frontier War (1850-1852),
Robert Godlonton was to write of "renegade Hottentots, Mantatees,
 ·26 A. E. voss

Bushmen, who were devastating ... part ofthe country. ,,10

Mrs Ward's image of the Bushman is not typical of the nineteenth
century. The dominant image of the Bushman from about 1850 until the
1920s is of a barely human, duplicitous, cruel savage. Late in the nineteenth
century the seeds are sown of the neo-Romantic, "modern" image of the
Bushman - kind, noble, indomitable, independent, infinitely adaptable to
Nature because infinitely wise in her ways. The rise of the modern myth
coincides with the rise of industrialisation and urbanisation. In the course of
this rivalry of myths the image of the Bushmen is inextricably involved with
the social, economic, political and intellectual history of South Africa.
Bushmen looked different on the Eastern Cape frontier from their image in
the exhibition rooms of London.
Pringle would have agreed with John Philip of the Bushmen that "The
civilization of the degraded people is not only practicable but might be easily
attained ... ,,11 The implicit idea is "that progress applied to the field of
human activity, " although for Philip and the missionaries the first step in
progress would be conversion to Christianity or some other manifestation of
the intervention of grace. In the period immediately after Pringle and Philip,
this idea of "progress" disappears, only to re-appear "in full force" according
Reproduced by Sabinet Gateway under licence granted by the Publisher (dated 2009).

to Elvin Hatch "during the 1860s and 1870s." As Hatch points out, "These
two decades constitute the beginning of anthropology as a self-conscious,
professional discipline ... ,,12 In South Africa these two decades constitute
also the beginning of industrialisation and consequent urbanisation.
In 1850, Livingstone wrote that "the Bushmen of the Desert are perhaps the
most degraded specimens of the human family. ,,13 Although repeated
missions to the Bushman had been unsuccessful, Livingstone would
presumably not have agreed that the Bushmen had no "perception of a deity"
since he had been informed that they:

in burying their dead address them in reference to these articles [tools,

utensils and fuel left by the grave] thus: "You have all that belongs to you;
go away to your God, and let us eat what we can get here." (155)

And Livingstone's image of "the human family" is replaced by an image of a

more mechanical hierarchy:

The highest type of monkey suggests - thanks, or rather, blame to

Darwin - the lowest type of man in Africa. This is the Bushman, or, as
the Dutch have it, the Bosjesman. 14
 THE IMAGE OF THE BUSHMAN 27

Thus R.M. Ballantyne, for whom the only release from savagery was
conversion:

A savage is a savage, and in my experience ofthe natives of different parts

of the earth, I have never met with what is styled the "Noble Savage", nor
even heard of a genuine specimen, except in cases where individuals have
embraced the civilising Gospel. (p.43)

Anthony Trollope was in South Africa at about the same time as

Ballantyne. His comparison of Bushmen and Hottentot, comes out much in
favour of the latter:

The Hottentots have not received, as Savages, a bad character. They are
said to have possessed fidelity, attachment and intelligence; to have been
generally good to their children; to have believed in the immortality of the
soul, and to have worshipped a god. The Hottentot possessed property
and appreciated its value. He was not naturally cruel, and was prone
rather to submit than to fight. The Bosjesman, or Bushman, was of a
lower order, smaller in stature, more degraded in appearance, filthier in
his habits, occasionally a cannibal, eating his own children when driven
Reproduced by Sabinet Gateway under licence granted by the Publisher (dated 2009).

by hunger, cruel, and useless. Even he was something better than the
Australian aboriginal, but was very inferior to his near relative, the
Hottentot. IS

There are faint traces here of "the human family" and some of Trollope's
hallmarks of savagery (apart from undifferentiated viciousness) go back at
least to Adam Smith ("property") - but the rhetorically climactic "useless" is
a high Victorian touch. By the later nineteenth century, at least one colonial
poet, Stafford Cruikshanks, was questioning whether or not half of
Grahamstown's population were human at all:

Of the rabble heterogeneous -

Some are Kafirs some Tambookies,
Fingoes, Totties, Zulus, Gonas,
Mozambiques, Korannas, Bushmen ...
Sometimes, truly, for a wonder,
Some of them will work for payment,
Taking care to give more trouble
Than would weigh against their labour.
... some luckier discoverer ...
. . . perchance may see more reason
 28 A. E. voss

Than myself for giving credit

To the tale that from fair Adam
And his fairer God-given consort
Such Yahoos could have descended. 16

By the early twentieth century, this line of the Bushman image, to which
Francis Carey Slater contributes, leads to the unambiguous conclusion of
G.M. Theal: "It can now be asserted in positive language that the Bushmen
were incapable of adopting European civilization. ,,17 This is just about a
century after Philip's claim that "The civilization of that degraded people is
not only practicable but might be easily attained. "
By certain demanding standards of the nineteenth-century post-Darwin
and post-Marx ethic, the Bushmen are found wanting. Their minimal
technology and hunter-gatherer lifestyle is insufficient to distinguish the
Bushmen from the animals.

[Men] themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as

they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is
conditioned by their physical organisation. 18
Reproduced by Sabinet Gateway under licence granted by the Publisher (dated 2009).

The Bushmen's "physical organisation" does not require work - "I toil not
for my cheer." 19 What Pringle had imagined as defiant adaptability to
Nature in extremis, is dismissed in the late nineteenth century as mere
submission to Nature:

the animal merely uses its environment, and brings about changes in it
simply by its presence; this is the final essential distinction between man
and other animals, and once again it is labour that brings about this
distinction. 20

Biologically, as well as demographically, the Bushman was on a frontier. In

the Marx-Engels sense he could not cross that frontier to become "working
man." Situated so far from industrial technology, the Bushmen were, in
Alex la Guma's words, "the first to fight,,21 and the last to be
proletarianised. No progress could take place since it was not possible to
build up sufficient inheritance of skill and understanding in the group
environment:

modern natural science has extended the principle of the origin of all
thought content from experience in a way that breaks down its old
 THE IMAGE OF THE BUSHMAN 29

metaphysical limitation and formulation. By recognising the inheritance

of acquired characteristics, it extends the subject of experience from the
individual to the genus; the single individual that must have experienced it
is no longer necessary, its individual experience can be replaced to a
certain extent by the results of the experiences of a number of its
ancestors. If for instance, among us the mathematical axioms seem
self-evident to every eight-year old child, and in no need of proof from
experience, that is solely the result of "accumulated inheritance." It
could be difficult to teach them by a proof to a bushman or Australian
negro. 22

As well as lacking the need (or the capacity) for work, the Bushman lacked
"history." When the model for all human enquiry is "modern natural
science" and human history is modelled on "natural history", then certain
human beings - like certain other animals - are dispensable:

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the

civilized races will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage
races throughout the world. 23
Reproduced by Sabinet Gateway under licence granted by the Publisher (dated 2009).

So much for "the civilizing gospel." The social processes are as relentless as
the natural, since a people must submit either to appropriation by the
industrial economy or to extinction.

Peoples who have never had a history of their own, which from the
moment they reached the first, crudest stages of civilization already came
under foreign domination or which were only forced into the first stages
of civilization through a foreign yoke, have no utility, they never will be
able to attain any sort of independence. 24

If this is taken as the progressive cutting edge of nineteenth century thought,

there is a sense in which the ascription of history (by historians), of civilization
(by anthropologists) and of independence (by politicians) to the subject
peoples of Africa is mere subterfuge, means whereby those in power attempt
to assuage guilt felt for their part in the process which offered only extinction
as an alternative.
It is especially the function of "literature" about the Bushmen to deal with
the guilt generated by the process of their extinction. The image of the
Bushman as, in the words of John B. Wright, "expendable savages,,25
continues at least until the 1920s as in Slater's The Karroo (1924):
 30 A. E. voss

Dust are those fugitive pygmies, blown by the winds of the desert,
Crushed and heedlessly trodden 'neath heels of hurrying change:
Hunters and haters of men, their hatred has crumbled to ashes:
Hated of men and hunted, hatred pursued them no more!
Clumsy weapons of stone, rough bows and a handful of arrows -
Relics of hunger and hate - only remain of their lives ... 26

Slater's hexameters barely cloak the Darwinian disdain. But evolution will
proceed even to the beat of poulter's measure:

You pigmies lived in dust and filth,

The earth with lepers sowing,
And man, though gaining by your past,
Is better for your going.

For morning hues must pass away,

And dawn be left in shining.
The moving Earth the sta~nant leaves,
And passes unrepining. 7
Reproduced by Sabinet Gateway under licence granted by the Publisher (dated 2009).

The work of William Charles Scully illustrates contradictory responses to the

Bushmen and the complementary functions of prose and verse in the
propagation of the appropriate image. In the ostensibly factual introduction
to Between Sun and Sand (1898) Scully writes dispassionately of the Bushmen
of the North-Western Cape:

The Bushman was the true Ishmaelite; he was bound to be eliminated. As

a matter of fact there is no room for a Bushman and anyone else in any
given area, no matter how large. 28

He mentions "a still older race" than the Bushmen,

which, perhaps, was driven from the face of the land by the Bushmen, as
we have driven the latter, and as we ourselves may be driven by some race
developing a "fitness" superior to our own. (13)

But in verse, rhetorical address and "poetic diction" are used to less assertive
and more mysterious purposes. The cave of the title of Scully's poem in
1886, "The Bushman's Cave, " is treated as a kind of shrine:

Poor waifs upon creation's skirts,

 THE IMAGE OF THE BUSHMAN 31

Your melancholy history,

To men of earnest minds, asserts
A problem and a mystery:
Whence came ye? Wherefore did ye live
To wither from the sphere of being -
And why did Nature to ye give
No ears to hear, nor eyes for seeing? -

The music and the light whereby

All men must walk, to guide your steps
Along life's path beneath the sky,
Between the staring pitfall deeps;
Ye sank from something higher far,
And distanced in life's struggling race,
Your last and failing remnants are
Erased from off the world's great face. 29

In this stage of the development of the modern Bushman myth, the one
factor that is accepted in mitigation of the sentence of extinction is the fact
that the accused is an artist:
Reproduced by Sabinet Gateway under licence granted by the Publisher (dated 2009).

But looming from cave and krantz are inscribed in colours that fade not,
Hints from the heart of their secret - symbols and signs of their dreams.

Your painted rocks are by us still

Empanelling your story!

The Bushmen, wretched as their condition was, seem to have had faculties
not incapable of cultivation, and in the matter of artistic talent at least
they stood higher than any of the races around them. 30

The Bushmen, although as a group they were not sufficiently productive to

survive, could be seen, individually, as creative artists. At the moment in
which industrialisation's demands for labour and the inexorability of
evolution are threatening - "the single individual that must have experienced
it is no longer necessary" - the modern artist invokes the Bushman
predecessor / victim to claim that "individual experience" can not be replaced
by "the results of the experiences of a number of ... ancestors." In a
post-Romantic aesthetic approach to cave-painting, "the single individual" is
the necessary, if doomed, artist whom Waldo imagines in The Story of an
African Farm:
 32 A. E. voss

Sometimes I lie under that little hill with my sheep, and it seems that the
stones are really speaking - speaking of the old things, of the time when
the strange fishes and animals lived that are turned into stone now; and
the time when the little Bushmen lived here, so small and so ugly, and used
to sleep in the wild dog holes, and eat snakes, and shot the bucks with their
poisoned arrows. It was one of them, one of these old wild Bushmen,
that painted those pictures there. He did not know why he painted but
he wanted to make something, so he made these. He worked hard, very
hard, to find the juice to make the paint; and then he found this place
where the rocks hang over, and he painted them. To us they are only
strange things, that make us laugh; but to him they were very beautiful. 31

The disappearance of the threat of the Bushmen as a group makes possible this
encounter with the individual Bushman and his subsequent conversion. Two
varieties of conversion may be contrasted in two distinctive, almost con-
temporary, narratives: one a "factual" account of religious conversion, the
other an "imaginative" account of a dyad of settler-San solidarity.
In 1873 Dr Henry Callaway returned from Natal to the UK to be
Reproduced by Sabinet Gateway under licence granted by the Publisher (dated 2009).

consecrated Bishop of Kaffraria: in his party was May, a "little Bush girl" who
had been captured by Basutos in a retaliatory cattle raid, before being taken
into Callaway's household at Springvale. The Little Bush Girl, published by
the SPCK in 1874, gives an account of May's conversion (to both Christianity
and civilization) and of her brief life in England before her death, which is
described in such a way as to make a kind of sisterhood between narrator and
victim:

On returning, I went immediately to her, when I found her, to my distress,

much worse, evidently dying. We gave her a little brandy, but she was
too far gone; she just swallowed it, then, recognising me, said, "Turn
me." I did so. She immediately said it again three times. The last
time, I said "This way, dear?" She looked up at me so sweetly, and said
"Yes, dear." She put her little cold hand in mine and gently fell asleep,
like a tired child, without the least apparent suffering. I felt that the
loving Jesus was very near, and committed the soul of our little one to His
tender care. . .. On the day of her funeral 1 made a large cross of pure
white roses to place upon the coffin. We all followed her to the grave,
where all her little school-fellows, with their schoolmistress, had assembled,
dressed in their best frocks, each holding a bouquet of flowers, which they
threw upon the coffin, all weeping most bitterly for the loss of their little
African sister. She had found a way into their hearts in a most
wonderful way. 32
 THE IMAGE OF THE BUSHMAN 33

Pringle and the bush-boy of "Afar in the Desert" mark the beginnings of the
myth of San-settler comradeship in South Africa. With other aspects of
Pringle's vision this motif disappears until in 1876 it surfaces in George
Linton: Or the First Years ofan English Colony, by (Sir) John Robinson, first
Prime Minister of Natal. George Linton's adoption of the Bushman lad is
the frontier counterpart of Miss Button's sisterhood with May, the bush girl:

As the coast is neared they pass a region infested by Bushmen. These

tiny marauders hover about the waggons, and at night send poisoned
arrows among the cattle. George finds one sticking in the canvas close
by his head, and tests the efficacy of its deadly sting by slaying a captured
wolf with it. One night he and others feign security and lie in
ambush. Down the elfin robbers come - true imps of darkness. They
seize some cattle, and are preparing to destroy whatever unconscious
slumberers may be safely within killing reach, when a fatal volley pours
forth upon them. Six are left dead by the waggons; the rest decamp and
are never seen again. One little lad is wounded and taken possession of
by George, and to this day he lives, a memorial of the power of mercy. 33
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At the very time when Miss Button was telling the story of May, and John
Robinson the story of George, the language of the Bushmen was "being fully
investigated by Dr Bleek. ,,34 These investigations into language (and
mythology) led to a conclusion on which the total rehabilitation of the
Bushman, as distinct from piecemeal individual encounter or conversion,
could proceed:

by their general mental and physical characteristics they lay claim to a

nearer kindred with ourselves than many far more civilized nations,
especially those of the Kafir and Negro type. And certainly the
possession of similar mythological notions, of which both Kafirs and
Negroes are, generally speaking, destitute, is of no small moment in
gauging their real affinities. 35

Noble savage, degraded fellow-member of the human family, military ally,

"expendable savage", potential convert: the Bushman has been at last
transformed into the genetically long-lost brother of the European:

driven onward before the development and advance of races stronger

than himself, [the Bushman] still fostered and carried with him this
art-germ, until he found himself land-locked in the silent parts of the
 34 A. E. voss

earth, while far in his rear, and severed from him by a migration of still
darker negro barbarism, which must have subsequently forced itself
across the path he had taken, the northern nations, of which he was a
distant link, were carried onward by a steady afterflood of progress. 36

This comes from a book which laid the cornerstone of the twentieth-century
myth of the Bushmen: George William Stow's The Native Races of South
Africa, written by 1880, although only published in 1905. Subtitled A
History of the Intrusion of the Hottentots and Bantu into the Hunting
Grounds of the Bushmen, the Aborigines of the Country, Stow's epic
consolidates the heroic image of the Bushman, individually and
collectively. Stow claimed that he was moved by "a simple desire of
acquiring historical knowledge" (x) "to work out the primitive history of a
country which never possessed a history of its own" (2); but he had produced,
among other things, an attack on (most) missionaries, on the "stronger races"
and on colonial indifference to scientific enquiry. Stow had reversed the
Bushmen/Hottentot order, and entered a plea in the emigrant/immigrant's
defence: if the Khoi and the Bantu-speakers as well as the whites were
intruders, then all were equally guilty, and the fear that the black man
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belonged in South Africa and the white man didn't, could be assuaged.
The Native Races finds a place for the Bushman in the post-industrial
English imagination in South Africa. Stow, a geologist, had begun his
systematic study of the Bushmen in 1867, and he was, at least partly, able to
pursue it on the impetus given to geological enquiry by the discovery of
diamonds: ethnological work in the field could be combined with mineral
exploration. When he died in 1882, Stow was manager of a company formed
to serve the diamond fields by exploiting the coalfield which Stow himself had
discovered. The industrialization of South Africa, as a stage in the process
of "intrusion" by "the Stronger Races," has made the modern Bushman
myth. By virtually removing the historical people it purports to re-create, it
has made the a-historical myth-figure possible: by materially changing the
land and society of South Africa, it has generated the sophisticated nostalgia
that demands the myth.
From the I 920s the modern image ofthe Bushman has been sophisticated in
a number of ways. In 1926 Ernest Glanville published The Hunter: A Story
of Bushman Life. This might be termed a "separate development romance":
Settlers never appear, and the Bushman life cycle is complete, independent
and removed. The story is told as if with inside knowledge, but from outside
history:
 THE IMAGE OF THE BUSHMAN 35

The Bushmen had received notice to quit. It was a notice always

running, with the force of night, since the beginning, and had been
enforced by the Gauls in Europe, by the Phoenicians, by Romans,
Egyptians, and Arabs, and finally, by the Bantu. Every community
which had settled down to an ordered state in the keeping of heads and the
tilling of the soil had no other intercourse with the free rovers than by the
force of arms. 37

Also in 1926, Voorslag flashed across the South African literary sky: writing
of that phenomenon many years later, William Plomer perhaps unwittingly
recalls both Stow and Bleek. The Voorslagters "like twentieth-century
Bushmen, had left a few vivid paintings on the walls of that dark cave, the
mind of the White South African." Yet "nothing so European" as Voorslag
had confronted its readers before. 38
Laurens van der Post, the junior Voorslagter, has been the most extravagant
propagator of the Bushman myth. Claiming, in The Lost World of the
Kalahari (1958) , descent from Stow, Van der Post's enterprise has throughout
been condescending, nostalgic, colonial: the literary exploitation of a
technologically simple people for the edification of "Europe":
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evidence ... all over the country as I grew up confirmed for me the belief
to which I have clung gratefully ever since, that there is one thing of which
no-one can ever deprive the denied and rejected little hunter: the honour
of being at the head ofthose men who have earned a cross for gallant and
sustained conduct on active service of life in Africa, when the great
campaign was blinder and the issue even more in doubt, than in this split
atomic age. 39

Harriet Ward and Darwin can still be heard: when the Border war is over, will
the SADF's Bushmen trackers join the MOTHS?
The primacy of the Bushmen is nostalgically acknowledged in Lawrence G.
Green's short story "Virgin Peak" (1949) . A climber makes what he thinks is
the first ascent of the "unconquered and unclimbable . . . Bushman
Peak." As he gathers stones at the summit for a cairn, he finds "a tiny stone
blade, chipped patiently by human hands ... It seemed foolish, but it was a
blow. ,,40 In recent South African English lyric, the poet tends rather to
stress continuity and identity with the Bushman, as artist. Thus Alan Ross in
"Rock Painting, Drakensberg" (1962):

Art remains a kind of hunt

Eliminating fear and cant,
 • 36 A. E. voss

A means of pinning down

An object, by the sheer act
of drawing animal or loved one,
Making absence into fact. 41

Sidney Clouts's identification with the Bushmen is metaphysical and mystical,

as in "Firebowl": "we who dance we find/the/fire of the fire. ,,42 Geoffrey
Haresnape's "Two Poems (Suggested by South African Rock Art)" aore like
museum display-cases in verse. 43
The more interesting lyric poets' treatments of the Bushmen myth are
distinctive for their conscious engagement with the myth. Anthony Delius's
exuberant The Last Division casts an old Bushman as one of the three
gurus. 44 Timothy Holmes in "The Conquered" effects an oblique and ironic
version of the San-Settler identification. 45 Peter Strauss in a highly
sophisticated but assured sequence, Photographs of Bushmen, has subjected
images of the myth to a careful scrutiny on the principles of Bergerian
aesthetics. 46 Stephen Gray has turned the tables on Pringle in "Afar in the
Desert: Bush-Boy Speaks. ,,47
Certain works of South African prose fiction have been obvious ideological
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exploiters of the San-Settler motif. In Alan Scholefield's Great Elephant

(1967), set in Zululand in the 1820s,

the Bushman, Stone-Axe ... was my father's man, part servant, part
comrade. My father had once saved his life and he, in return, had saved
my father ... Stone-axe ... was my other teacher. [The boy's first
teacher is his mother.] I don't suppose there was anything in the world
that Stone-Axe didn't know; I mean that was worth knowing ... 48

In Van der Post's A Story Like the Wind, the rider/bushboy motif takes a
distinct turn. The white South African Francois and the Bushman Xhabbo
unite (with other mythological figures) against "the mysterious Chinese, " the
World Council of Christian Churches and "the 'freedom fighters' of Africa. ,,49
In the same year (1972) in which Van der Post's romance appeared, Alex la
Guma published In the Fog of the Seasons' End. In the first chapter Beukes
recalls, as he passes the South African Museum in Cape Town, an
appointment kept there previously with another political activist:

These Bushmen had hunted with bows and tiny arrows behind glass;
red-yellow dwarfs with peppercorn hair and beady e~es. Beukes had
thought sentimentally that they were the first to fight. 0
 THE IMAGE OF THE BUSHMAN 37

Van der Post's and Beukes's Bushmen are not on the same side.
In Gillian Becker's The Union (1971), the heroes, Willem and Simon,
imagined as a brotherhood of guerillas in opposition to establishment South
African society, are identified with the Bushmen. 51
Modernism has done its sophisticated best to disguise or invert the myth,
which persists nevertheless; as in the complex setting of 1.M. Coetzee's
Waiting for the Barbarians,52 where the Magistrate's relationship with the
barbarian girl is an agonized version of the San-Settler bond. Wilma
Stockenstrom's "little people" in her The Expedition to the Baobab Tree are a
just epitome of the mythical "Bushmen":

when I see the little people I know ther are dream-figures that really hunt
and really provide me with food. .. 3

The single most inclusive statement of the Bushman myth has been the hero of
Athol Fugard's Boesman and Lena: hunter-gatherer in the wastes of industrial
capitalism, self-restrained dancer and singer, transformed by tragedy and
existentialism from outcast to hero. 54
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NOTES

I. This paper follows on my "Thomas Pringle and the Image of the 'Bushmen' , "
English in Africa, 9,1 (May 1982): 15-28. On San historiography see John Wright,
"San History and Non-San Historians," The Societies of Southern Africa in the 19th
and 20th Centuries, Vol.8, Collected Seminar Papers, N 0.22, Institute of
Commonwealth Studies, University of London. On the development of
anthropologists' view of the San, see A.J. B. Humphreys, "A Kaleidoscope of Values:
Changing Perspectives on San Society," Centre for Research on Africa, University of
the Western Cape, August 1984. Robert Gordon has written on the ideological
motives for conservation/ exploitation of the San in, for example, "Conserving
Bushmen to Extinction in Southern Africa," paper prepared for the First World
Conference on Culture Parks, September 1984. David Maughan-Brown has analysed
the ideological uses of the Bushmen in "The Noble Savage in Anglo-Saxon Colonial
Ideology, 1950-1980: 'Masai' and 'Bushmen' in Popular Fiction," English in Africa,
10,2 (Oct. 1983): 55-77.
This paper is indebted to all these scholars.
2. Hayden White, "The Forms of Wildness: Archaeology of an Idea, "in The Wild
Man Within: An Image in Western Thoughtfrom the Renaissance to Romanticism,
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972,3-38:28.
 • 38 A. E. voss

3. Selected Poems, OUP, 1947: 97.

4. From Man to Man, T. Fisher Unwin, 1926: The Bushman image varies largely
in relation to that of the "Hottentot." In the conclusion of From Man to Man,
Schreiner does effect a kind of reconciliation: her heroine takes into her family the
issue of her husband's liaison with a "coloured" servant; significantly the child is
named "Sartje", for Sartje Baartman, the "Hottentot Venus. "
The most thoroughgoing fictional attempt to rehabilitate the "Hottentot" is
Hjalmar Thesen's image of the "Strandlopers" in The Echoing Cliffs, London, 1963.
5. The Bosjesman: A Lecture on the Mental, Moral and Physical Attributes of the
Bushmen, or African Savages, with Anecdotes, by One of Their Guardians. (London,
1847) State Library, Reprint No.70, Pretoria, 1947: 2,6.
6. "The Noble Savage," Household Words, No.168 (II June 1853): 337-39: 337.
7. History of the Bosjesmans, or Bush People . .. , London, 1847: 7. See also R.
Altick, The Shows of London, Harvard, the Belkap Press, 1978: Ch.20 "The Noble
Savage Reconsidered. "
8. DSAB, IV; Ward, Mrs Harriet.
9. Five Years in Kajirland, 2 Vols, London, 1848: II, 112.
10. Robert Godlonton and Edward Irving, Narrative of the Kaffir War (1851),
rpt. , Cape Town, 1962: 171.
II. John Philip, Researches in South Africa (1828), 2 Vols .• rpt., Cape Town,
1969: 11,9.
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12. Elvin Hatch, Theories of Man and Culture, N.Y. and London, 1973: 13-14.
13. Missionary Correspondence, 1846-1856, ed. I. Schapera, Berkeley, 1961: 161.
14. R.M. Ballantyne, Six Months at the Cape, London, 1876: 113.
15. South Africa (1878), rpt. ed. J.H. Davidson, Cape Town, 1873: 44.
16. Stafford Cruikshanks, "Who's Who in Grahamstown (A Sketch after
'Hiawatha')," in Lays of South Africa on Topics Principally Modern, London, 1881:
143-44.
17. Ethnography and Condition of South Africa before AD 1505 (1922), rpt. Cape
Town, 1964: 76.
18. Marx/Engels, The German Ideology, 1845-6; quoted by Stanley Edgar
Hyman, The Tangled Bank, N.Y., 1974: 93.
19. Thomas Pringle, "The Song of the Wild Bushman," in Poems Illustrative of
South Africa, ed. J.R. Wahl, Cape Town, 1970: 13.
20. Engels, "The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man"
(1876); rpt. in The Origin of the Family ... , ed. Eleanor Burke Leacock, N.Y., 1973:
251-64: 260.
21. Alex la Guma, In the Fog of the Seasons' End, London, 1972: 14.
22. Engels, Dialectics of Nature; quoted by Diane Paul "In the Interests of
Civilization: Marxist Views of Race and Culture in the Nineteenth Century," JH142, I
(Jan.-Mar. 1981): 115-138: 118.
23. Darwin, The Descent of Man, London, 1871: 118.
24. Engels, "Democratic Panslavism; " quoted by Paul, op. cit.: 137.
 THE IMAGE OF THE BUSHMAN 39

25. Wright, op. cit.: 2.

26. Slater, loc. cit.
27. Owen R. Thompson, "The Bushman" (1919) in The Voice of the Veldt: South
African Poems, London, 1930: 80.
28. Cape Town, 1898: 15.
29. In E.H. Crouch, ed., South African Poetry and Verse, London, 1907: 94.
30. Slater, loc. cit.; JamesCappon, Britains Title in South Africa, London, 1901:
80.
31. London (1883); rpt. Johannesburg, 1979: II. The Bushman figures elsewhere
in Schreiner's writing, always significantly, e.g. Dream Life and Real Life: A Little
African Story, London, 1893; and Thoughts on South Africa (1923), rpt. Johannes-
burg, 1976: esp. 107-10.
32. [Miss Button], May, the Little Bush Girl. London, SPCK, n.d. [1874]:
30-31. The loyal African who dies in the arms of the heroic settler recurs, of course,
particularly in South African war, mining and hunting fiction.
33. London, 1876: 383.
34. May, the Little Bush Girl: 10.
35. "On Resemblances in Bushman and Australian Mythology with Preliminary
Remarks by Dr Bleek," Cape Monthly Magazine, new series, VIII (1874): 98-102: 101.
36. George William Stow, The Native Races of South Africa, London, 1905: 233.
37. London, Cape, 1926: 9. EthelredaLewis's Mantis published in London in the
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same year, is on the surface more obviously in the Rider Haggard tradition; the
implications of both Glanville's work and Lewis's are segregationist and paternalistic.
38. William Plomer, The South African Autobiography, Cape Town, 1984:
172. See also H.C. Bosman, "Rock Paintings of the Bushman" (1942) in Uncollected
Essays, Cape Town, 1981: 37-39. Plomer also used the Bushman in "VIa Masondo;"
I Speak of Africa, London, 1927: 83-150.
39. London, 1958: 38-39; I mean "Europe" in the sense in which Unamuno used the
word: "what we long for and have need of is soul- soul of bulk and substance ... and
now they talk to us about Culture and Europe ... " The Tragic Sense of Life (1912),
London, 1962: 289.
40. Veld- Trails and Pavements, ed. Bosman and Bredell, Johannesburg, 1949: 97.
41. F.G. Butler and C. Mann, eds., A New Book of South African Verse in
English, Cape Town, 1979: 156.
42. Butler and Mann: 14; see also Jack Cope, "Rock Painting, "in Cope and Krige,
eds., Penguin Book of South African Verse, Harmondsworth, 1968: 86; and R.
Griffiths, "The Last Three Bushmen," New Coin, 1,2 (April 1965): 2.
43. Drive of the Tide, Cape Town, Maskew Miller, 1976: 12-13.
44. Cape Town, 1959: 9-10. Delius used the myth more conventionally in the
figure of "Jon Slong" (Jan Slang) in his settler novel Border, Cape Town, 1976.
45. Seven South African Poets, ed. Cosmo Pieterse, London, 1971: 80.
46. Johannesburg, 1974: 3-10.
47. Hottentot Venus and Other Poems, Cape Town, 1979: 12.
 40 A. E. voss

48. London, 1967: 24.

49. London, 1972: 347.
50. La Guma, loc. cit.
51. London, 1971: 245. Late in the novel there is a scene strongly reminiscent of
Pringle's "Afar in the Desert:" 248-51.
52. Johannesburg, 1981.
53. Tr. from the Afrikaans (Die Kremetartekspedisie) by J.M. Coetzee, Johannes-
burg, 1983: 92. References to Stockenstrom and La Guma suggest that t~re are
distinct lineages of the Bushman myth in black and in Afrikaans writing. In addition,
historiography, like fiction, has isolated the Bushman as individual. Two examples
illustrate the opposing forms of reluctant proletarian and defiant outlaw that represent
extremes of the myth: see L. Currie, "The Odyssey of our Bushman Boy, " Translations
of the Royal Society of South Africa, 2 (1910): 13-18; and Christopher Saunders,
"Madolo: a Bushman Life," African Studies, 36 (1977): 145-54.
54. Boesman and Lena was first staged in Grahamstown in 1969; first published in
Cape Town in the same year. Full treatment ofthe motif would require consideration
of other media: ethnographic film; popular film (e.g. Jamie Uys's The Gods Must be
Crazy); popular music and song (Steve Kekana); art music (Kevin Volans's African
Paraphrases) .
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